A spy story with a difference

Another testimony to the continuing saga of the socialist state of Cuba.

ANA BELES MONTES had a normal American life. Born in Germany to Dr. Alberto Montes, a United States Army psychiatrist, and Emilia Montes, a strong advocate for Latino rights, this child of Puerto Rican parents lived in the suburbs of Kansas and then Maryland in the U.S., attended good schools, went to college and then joined the Defence Intelligence Agency (DIA). A few days after September 11, 2001, the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) arrested her, charged her with espionage, held her until October 16, 2002, when she pleaded guilty to passing state secrets to the Cuban government.

After the generally liberal District of Columbia jurist, Judge Ricardo M. Urbina, sentenced her to 25 years in prison, Beles Montes remained unrepentant as she explained the reasons for her betrayal: "I engaged in the activity that brought me before you because I obeyed my conscience rather than the law. I believe our government's policy toward Cuba is cruel and unfair, profoundly unneighbourly, and I felt morally obligated to help the island defend itself from our efforts to impose our values and our political system on it. We have displayed intolerance and contempt toward Cuba for most of the last four decades. We have never respected Cuba's right to make its own journey toward its own ideals of equality and justice. I do not understand why we must continue to dictate how the Cubans should select their leaders, who their leaders cannot be, and what laws are appropriate in their land. Why can't we let Cuba pursue its own internal journey, as the U.S. has been doing for over two centuries?"

Judge Urbina said, with concern on his face, "If you cannot love your country, at least you should do it no wrong. You decided to put the U.S. in harm's way; you must pay the penalty."

Beles Montes is an unusual spy. Court documents show that she probably reached out to the Cuban government in 1985 while in transition between her job at the Department of Justice and the DIA (where she was a junior analyst on the Nicaragua Desk). In the space of 15 years, she gained a very high level of access to materials and persons in the Pentagon, and became one of the principal U.S. government advisers on Cuba. She wrote a crucial 1998 Pentagon paper that argued that Cuba is no longer a military threat to the U.S., and in 1999 she fought to have U.S.-Cuban military joint exercises as a step towards the development of fraternal relations. The government charged that in this period, Beles Montes told the Cubans of at least four undercover U.S. agents in operation within Cuba and passed on invaluable information on government conversations on the Cuban question.

What is also of interest is the media blackout of the Beles Montes case. The Miami Herald reported the minute details of the case mainly because of the large Cuban-American population that dominates Miami's politics and social life. The other major papers kept up with the developments, but buried them behind coverage of the "war on terrorism", the war in Afghanistan, the Enron and WorldCom debacles and finally, the sniper murders in the Washington area (these last came just when the court sentenced Beles Montes).

One of the reasons for the case coming under the radar of public opinion was perhaps that Beles Montes refused to be paid by the Cubans; indeed she insists that she spied for them on ideological and moral grounds. In the past decade, the arrests of U.S. spies show us that all of them worked for money and not ideas. The two most expensive spies worked for the Kremlin: the Central Intelligence Agency's Aldrich Ames ($2.7 million) and the FBI's Robert Hanssen ($1.4 million). But the others, including Air Force Sergeant Brian Regan, Army Reserve Colonel George Trofimoff, the National Security Agency's David Boone, the FBI's Edwin Earle Pitts and Naval Intelligence's Jonathan Jay Pollard - all worked for money. Not so, Beles Montes. After the court sentenced her, Cuba's Foreign Minister Felipe Perez Roque expressed his "profound respect and admiration for Ana Beles Montes. Her actions were moved by ethics and by an admirable sense of justice." Even Judge Urbina had a hard time being outraged by her actions. He merely said that disagreements with policy are one thing, whereas espionage is a betrayal of an oath.

Indeed, for the past several years, the U.S. embargo of Cuba has come to be seen as inhuman and that country a victim of both a Cold War legacy as well as of the right-wing Cuban-American interest groups. On May 15, 2002, former U.S. President (and now Nobel Peace laureate) Jimmy Carter stood in Havana beside Cuban President Fidel Castro to call for an end to the four-decade-long embargo. The U.S., he said, "should take the first step" to improve relations between the neighbours. The U.S. did, in fact, "take the first step" to create the distrust in the first place.

Before the Revolution could find its legs, the U.S. Senate in July 1959 authorised President Dwight Eisenhower to develop a sanctions regime in response to Cuban confiscations of U.S. property. Of course the property confiscated by the Agrarian Reform Law belonged to gangsters and others who had used Cuba as an offshore paradise for vice and corruption, but this sleight-of-hand between "U.S. property" and "gangster property" did not matter to the Senate.

Then, the U.S. government strangled Cuba's main import to the U.S., sugar, with import quotas in July 1960, as well as with export prohibitions of spare parts, medicines, machinery and oil to the island. When the U.S. and Cuba could not come to terms on the issue of compensation for the nationalised property, the U.S. government formally ceased relations on January 3, 1961, just two years after the Revolution. The economic blockade formally began in September 1961, just as the U.S. and Cuba faced a series of military and political crises (Bay of Pigs, the Cuban Missile Crisis).With Soviet economic and technical assistance, the Cuban economy remained afloat and the social reforms initiated by the regime transformed the destiny of the island. Expensive social programmes (for education, health and women's equality) and a reliance upon one major item of export (sugar) led to some economic problems, but also produced what Pat Holt, staff director of the U.S. Senate Foreign Relations Committee, said in July 1974 after a tour of the island, called "a Socialist showcase in the Western Hemisphere".

The U.S. and Cuba played cat and mouse with relations, but there was no movement on either side to create normality. During the Reagan administration which was when Beles Montes developed an interest in Cuba the U.S. government put pressure on the regime by backing the violent strategy of right-wing Cuban allies. The Cubans had just allowed 15,000 of their citizens to leave the island for the U.S. in April-May 1980. Many of them were highly educated but frustrated with the lack of middle-class comforts in the island. This was, of course, the result both of experimentation toward equity and of the embargo. Nevertheless, it did not help U.S.-Cuban relations.

As the Soviet Union dissolved, the U.S. increased pressure on Cuba. In 1992, Congressman Robert Torricelli sponsored the Cuba Democracy Act that prohibited U.S. firms from trading with Cuba and barred any ships into U.S. ports that would go to Cuba. Cuba's health sector suffered dramatically from this law, mainly because ships with medical supplies frequently sailed via the U.S. from Europe and Canada. In addition, the law allowed the government to fund right-wing Cuban exiles. In 1996, the Helms/Burton Cuban Liberty and Democratic Solidarity Act made it a criminal offence to trade with Cuba, and made any property of any person who conducts such trade open to confiscation by the U.S. government. This is an interesting spin on the Cuban Land Reforms Act of 1959 that started the hostility in the first place. It also tied the hands of the Clinton administration which had made some noises about normalisation: after the Pope's 1998 visit to the island, the U.S. government allowed humanitarian charter flights between Cuba and the U.S., relatives from both countries to visit each other and $1,200 a year to be sent by Cuban exiles to their relatives on the island. When some lawmakers suggested the creation of a commission on U.S.-Cuban relations, the Clinton administration refused to endorse it. The U.S. government, therefore, produced a formidable apparatus to isolate Cuba despite criticism from the world community.

The Cuban government did not sit by idly. It lobbied the world against the embargo, sending its main Ambassador, Castro, to speak to people across the world, but especially in Latin America and Europe. Castro also welcomed the Pope to the island in 1998 and Carter in 2002; he developed a new friendship with Venezuela's Hugo Chavez and became a celebrated speaker at new international fora against neoliberalism and racism, whether in Rio de Janeiro or Durban.

WHILE Beles Montes faced the court to hear her sentence, U.S. film-maker Estela Bravo's new documentary on Fidel Castro opened in New York City. Not only does the movie follow Fidel Castro's biography and share wonderful footage from the Cuban archives of the Revolution, but it interviews a host of international celebrities who offer testimonials on behalf of Fidel.

Writer Alice Walker, filmmaker Sidney Pollack, media tycoon Ted Turner, singer Harry Belafonte, Kennedy aide and historian Arthur Schlesinger, U.S. Congressman Charles Rangel, former Attorney-General Ramsey Clark, boxer Muhammed Ali, writer and Nobel laureate Gabriel Garcia Marquez and former South African President and Nobel laureate Nelson Mandela speak glowingly not only of Castro, but of socialist Cuba. Fidel comes off as a beloved, avuncular person whose contribution to Cuba has been decisive. The icon of Fidel challenges the validity of the right-wing Cuban exile view of, and U.S. policy toward, the island.

Fidel Castro has not made much of the Beles Montes case, but in 2001, he did speak at a rally on behalf of five Cuban agents arrested in Miami as part of the "Wasp Network" (La Red Avispa). "These comrades are political prisoners in the United States," Castro said. "Public opinion in Cuba and the world will know how they feel, what they think and how much dignity and courage they have. They will become an example for the young people around the world." The Wasp Network infiltrated the Cuban exile group Brothers to the Rescue who fly into Cuban airspace to (in their view) express solidarity with the Cuban people against the regime and (in the Cuban government's view) conduct acts of sabotage against the Cuban people. In February 1996, Gerardo Hernandez, the leader of the Network, gave the Cuban government information on the flight-pattern of a Brothers' plane, which was then shot down over the Florida Straits by the Cuban Air Force.

Beles Montes, unlike these agents, faced the much stronger charge of conspiracy to commit espionage, the same allegation that got Ethel and Julius Rosenberg the death penalty in 1950 (the government used the 1917 Espionage and Sedition Act in both cases). The fact that the U.S. government wants to keep the case relatively quiet, and that Beles Montes is eager to cooperate with the government although not to the extent of repudiating her morals, and that the Cuban government wants to honour her ethical standards, should signal why there has been no major rallies in Havana and no great fuss in the U.S.

In 2001, Secretary of State Colin Powell sat before the U.S. Congress to report that Castro "has done good things for his people" and, "he's no longer the threat he was." Powell may have based his assessment on Beles Montes' reports, but he may also believe them to be true. The problem with this spy story is that almost everyone agrees with her views even as the state must be repelled by her betrayal.